I went to the library, took my familiar chair, and read the case of
When it was six o’clock – a wet evening, pavements slick and gleaming – I left the library and returned to Tonbridge Hall. I didn’t go down to dinner. Julianne was not in and there.was no sign that she had been in all day and no sign that she would come back. I sat on my bed. The feeling returned, from my first evening at Tonbridge Hall: that I would just go on sitting in this room, that hours would spin into weeks and here I would be, in a bubble of silence, with my verses for company and the feeble ticking of the travelling clock. I got up and put out the light, electing to sit in the dark.
When Julianne came back next day I decided not to tell her about my letter, still less to show it to her. I was deeply ashamed of it, ashamed to belong to a family from which such a communication could issue. Not that I did belong to it, any more. I was cut adrift.
The ship went down like lead.
Now it is time to tell you about our housekeeping arrangements at Tonbridge Hall; this will lead me naturally to the matter of love. You must appreciate that we lived in a townscape, built to an unnatural scale: institutional, impersonal. We had come from our suburbs, villages and market towns, from stockbroker Tudor and inter-war semi with laburnum tree, from cosy terrace or mansion flat, to live in a public landscape of grey brick and Coade stone, the iron railings marching on, the brutal Senate House, the boastful British Museum. We walked to our colleges through streets with famous names, by statues and monuments, and we passed most of our lives in public rooms, seedy or grand, under strip lights or chandeliers. In. the evenings we came back, it is true, to our own narrow rooms, but even they recalled the felon’s accommodation, maintained at public expense, in some enlightened Scandinavian prison.
So it is not surprising that we tried to set up our own housekeeping routines, to recreate the domesticity of which (I suppose) we must have felt deprived. Our rooms were cleaned for us, and fresh bed linen was placed in our rooms each Thursday. We had very little to do except look after ourselves.
Each corridor had a poky kitchen, hardly more than a broom cupboard, with two gas-rings and a sink. Some girls would use the kitchens to heat milk or soup, but they were good for little else, and not pleasant places to congregate. A better place for pretending to a normal woman’s life was the laundry-room on the sixth floor; we would stand about and chat while washing-machines whirred and glugged. You never saw Karina up there. She washed her clothes – hairy jumpers and woollen tights – in the wash-basin in C21. Then she hung them over the radiators.
This did not please Lynette; when you called by she would indicate the dripping garments with a poke of her chin, and roll her dark eyes, but she didn’t say anything to Karina. Wet, the clothes looked bigger; the sweaters were elongated, their arms swinging and cuffs groping as if in search of a handhold.
Up in the laundry-room across from the machines there were a half-dozen ironing boards, where a half-dozen girls toiled: not always the same six, I mean, but girls with identical expressions, intent and methodical, martyred yet victorious. What were they ironing? Party dresses? Not at all. Shirts. Men’s shirts. Boyfriends’ shirts. Flattening the collar. Pressing the cuffs, easing and turning, finally lifting the garment with a flourish, high into the air like a flag, like a banner of triumph: a banner that told the whole world that I, a Tonbridge Hall girl, have got my man. I have got my man and I know how to look after him. I’m not just a pretty brain, you see; not just a pretty brain.
If I could time-travel I would fly back, back in time to the ironing-room; I would fly back to those girls and slap them. I would like to bring them to their senses; say, how can it be, that after all these years of education, all you want is the wash-tub? Leave this, and go and run the country. And yet I see that what they were up to, these surrogate housewives, was not so spiritless; it was a small rebellion against the lives they had led since puberty.
When men decided women could be educated – this is what I think – they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they made them wear collars and ties. It was a way to concede the right to learning, yet remain safe; the products of the system would always be inferior to the original model. Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it. And this is what we were, when we grew up at the Holy Redeemer; not so much little nuns, but little chappies, little chappies with breasts. At ‘bad’ schools the girls turned up in the mornings with streaks of mascara under their eyes, they talked dirty and flirted and sipped mixed drinks in violent colours. At ‘good’ schools the girls had plain faces and thick tights, stout shoes and bulging briefcases. They forfeited today for the promise of tomorrow, but the promise wasn’t fulfilled; they were reduced to middle-sexes, neuters, without the powers of men or the duties of women. Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature.
But we were released from the collars and ties now. All at once it happened, without preparation or warning, in the course of a day. No wonder we were confused, torn by conflicts no one had hinted at. We were eighteen, nineteen; we wanted high marks, because that was what we were trained to get. We were trained to defer gratification, to pamper and exercise and flaunt our mental powers, but now our bodies were registering their demands. We’d had sex; sex bred the desire for its consequences. The little women inside were looking out through our eyes and waving to the world.
We wanted homes. Houses of our own. Babies, even: the milky drool of saliva to replace the smooth flow of ink. We did not speak of it, but each corridor of Tonbridge Hall seethed with fertility-panic. In the groups who gathered for coffee after dinner, there was always one girl who thought she might be pregnant, one who was celebrating the fact that she wasn’t: celebrating outwardly, anyway. When friends met in the morning, or after a weekend away, there was always an undertone, a buzz-note of inquiry, an eyebrow raised – you are? You could be? You’re not? Late again! was the distraught mutter; we took the contraceptive pill, most of us, but we acted as if we didn’t believe it worked. Our doubts spoke of our desires, of our ambivalence. A blip of the bubblepack, a sip of water, the tiny taste of sweetness on the tongue; how could these prevail against the huge, mechanic workings of nature? Nature had been driven out with a pitchfork, and was creeping her way back in.
Of course, not everybody shared the fertility panics. I was celibate, though not through choice. Julianne seemed to have her body under control. And Claire, our next door neighbour: ‘I do worry about Sue,’ she said to me. ‘This new boyfriend of hers, you know, she has sexual relations with him.’
I wanted to murmur, that is usual nowadays, but I decided to listen with attention to Claire’s fears. ‘I don’t think Sue knows what she wants,’ she complained. ‘She – takes risks. She tells me she does.’
‘Isn’t she on the Pill?’
